Apache Trail #4

When Major Anderson gifts Lone Eagle a prized new Winchester rifle as a token of peace between the Army and his people, the young chief vows it will never fall into the wrong hands—but his nephew Hopping Squirrel is ambushed by hostile Blackfeet on the journey home, and the rifle is stolen. Now Lone Eagle must confront the rival war party led by Handy Tomahawk, who plans to use the powerful weapon to launch an attack on a wagon train camped in the ghost town of Skull-Ville. Honor and the bonds of friendship hang in the balance as the desert becomes a battleground.

An ornery hermit and his stubborn mule, Matilda, are stuck five miles from home when a slick desert entrepreneur named Ignatz offers a solution: a ten-dollar automobile. What should be a quick ride home turns into a comic battle of wills as the contraption proves as temperamental as the mule it was meant to replace. When the jalopy finally gives up the ghost, the old-timer faces an unexpected reckoning with his newfound "investment."

Bret Marshall and his partner Bright Feather ride into Dry Mesa just as a gang of masked bank robbers strikes—but when one of the desperados is captured, a mysterious sniper from within the town silences him before he can reveal the gang's secrets. Marshall notices an odd detail that others miss: the robbers' horses were shod backwards, a clue that sets him on a different trail than the town's sheriff. As Marshall closes in on the truth, he discovers the theft is far more complex than a simple bank robbery, and someone in town will stop at nothing to keep their identity hidden.

When Swift Arrow returns to his village, he finds Black Wolf spreading discord, claiming a vision has made him the rightful leader and demanding the tribe abandon Swift Arrow's ways. With the village divided and Black Wolf wielding both cunning rhetoric and a false idol of red stone, Swift Arrow must decide whether to restore order through force or faith in his people's judgment. "Cunning Versus Skill!" pits conviction against ambition in this 1958 frontier tale of leadership tested.